Hey, Your Nose is on Fire!

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Sounds to me like we may be approaching what this whole thing's been about all along, but I've been wrong before...

The Terebinth Story Archive      Villanelles always seem a little adversarial to me, and this one's no exception.

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      It always comes down to word definitions around here, doesn't it?

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Finally! Let's have some rushing around here for a change!

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Don't you worry about Chloe, Ochre. She's fulla the milk of amphibian kindness. Which, now that I think about it, prob'bly isn't a thing...

The Terebinth Story Archive      Esther's obviously never seen a Carmen Miranda movie...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Well, confusion is "job one" around here...      This page also marks the transition from Act II of our current melodrama into its concluding Act III! So stand by for that!

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Could that be some light dawning? Maybe?

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Quetzal's quoted words at the end there might begin to explain the reaction of the nematodes at the bottom of this page from near the end of our 87th storyline, " Stable 2 ." Because when we dangle a plot thread around these parts, we're talking years!

The Terebinth Story Archive      Trudy's apparently been running around looking for Esther and Lamont since page 1,833 . I'm not sure how long that's been for her , but for us readers, it's been more than three months...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Yes, I'm sure that this'll go well...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Let's see: Quetzal first showed up in the comic way back near the end of our 12th storyline, " Holiday ," and has had, as Ochre says here, numerous encounters with Our Heroes since.

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Settle back, folks. Looks like we've got story time coming up...

The Terebinth Story Archive      Ah, Falkirk...      We first saw the town in the background all the way back on page 85 with a little explanation about it on the next page, but we didn't actually visit the place till page 297 and following. It played a huge role in several storylines more than 20 years ago, so feel free to go back and read the whole series if you're so inclined.

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      I really think you need to make up your mind about this whole killing thing here, Ochre. Maybe next week?

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      My personal motto comes from the medicine bottles: "Keep away from children."

     Which oughtta do it.      Still, if folks would like to read more about these characters, the badger, the frog, and the mouse first showed up during the composition of my collection Plague Year Poems . Those are the 443 daily poems I wrote from March 22, 2020 till June 7, 2021, while the public library where I work was closed to the public for the coronavirus pandemic. The link in the previous sentence will take an interested reader to the entire collection's table of contents, but for the abovementioned characters, the badger first appears in a sequence that starts with poem #149 from August 17th, 2020 and runs for another 12 or 13 poems.      She then returns when I'm considering quitting the daily poem thing at the one-year mark. That sequence starts with poem #337 from February 21st, 2021 and crashes on through to the actual first anniversary of the the whole thing on March 21st, 2021. Spoi...

The Daily Grind Table of Contents      Lemme send folks back to page 3 of our 121st storyline, " The Transitive Property ," for a suggested image of what the inside of Lord Quetzal's temple on Cloud Forest might look like. The image in your imagination, of course, is much better than anything you'll see here, however...

The Terebinth Story Archive      Nothing like a little adversarial villanelle to get at the root of the issue, I always say! And by "always," I of course mean "seldom"...